Keeping the Floor in Multiparty Conversations: Intonation, Syntax, and Pause

Abstract

This statistical investigation of intonation, syntax, and pause in natural conversation assesses how these variables are combined and manipulated to achieve turn-taking goals. In general, the findings of our logistic regression model confirm much of the past qualitative work in Conversation Analysis, shedding light on floor-keeping strategies. In many cases, the intonation signaled turn continuation despite a syntactic boundary and certain combinations of intonation and syntax virtually assured a speaker's right to the floor. Pause duration was positively correlated with the probability of turn shift, except for an optimal pause duration range during which the same speaker was more likely to keep the floor. We suggest that these quantitative results form a baseline from which qualitative work may continue and that our choice of a more complex, six-way model of intonation boundaries is appropriate in the analysis of conversation, allowing for finer-grained distinctions than have traditionally been made.